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Wednesday, January 28, 2009

Write on Wednesday

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The revision process continues to be on my mind this winter- notice I said “on my mind,” meaning I haven’t done much more than think about it. The whole process of novel revision seems terribly daunting. I’ve been collecting other writer’s thoughts on their process of revision, hoping to get inspired, and it worked to some degree. I’ve started revising a short story I wrote last winter, hoping that by “practicing” on something smaller, I’ll be less intimidated by the work involved in revising the novel.

Here’s some food for thought regarding the revision process…as you will see, every author approaches it completely differently!

“I start on the first page. Then, I rewrite that page twenty or forty times until it’s right, and then it’s finished. Then, I go to page two and I do the same thing twenty or forty times.” Stephen Dixon

“I go over what I’ve written, but I’m not making major changes. I’m just fixing it by making minor changes that might have a big effect. I hardly throw anything out.” Jayne Ann Phillips

“I do twenty or thirty drafts. I’m a big reviser. I go back…and polish the beginning, then I force myself to go through page by page from beginning to end, over and over again.” Amy Bloom

“I go through with a very cold eye to cut out everything that can be cut without loss.” Thomas E. Kennedy

“I polish as I go along. My habit is to perfect individual sentences, individual paragraphs, and individual pages, and when I think they’re as good as I can make them, I feel free to go on to the next part. So when I write the last sentence of the last paragraph, I’m done with the book.” Kent Haruf

“I do a great many drafts, no matter what it is. This means letting it sit for a few days before looking at it again, then doing it again, then letting it sit and doing it again. I let my friends read drafts after the first ten or twelve. My early drafts are sketchy in the most important ways - everything vital is left out - and they’re wordy in other ways - there’s all this extraneous material that doesn’t matter. So the revisions are in both directions.” Andrea Barrett“I do a lot of revisions in fits and starts. When I write, I barrel through from beginning to end, and then back up, and if the beginning isn’t working, start over. Once it works, I write through to the end, and start revising, and, if necessary, trash the whole thing, and start over.” Myla Goldberg

Writer Bug posted some great revision advice which she picked up at her last residency. She talks about picking 15 areas you want to work on in your manuscript, and then going through it 15 times, focusing on one area each time. Some things to work with include: verbs, redundancy, verbosity, vagueness. She also advises reading the story aloud, which is a great idea.

As I’ve begun revising my own work, I’ve been taking one paragraph at a time, revising each sentence, looking for better words, paring down wordiness, then going on to the next paragraph until I’ve finished the page. Then I re-read the page and see how it flows. Once I’ve done each page, I’ll go back and re-read the whole thing to see if I need to make structural changes.

So, how about you? Anyone else out there in the process of revisions? If so, how’s it going?

I am a little lucky with revisions. I have an editor who is also my husband. He will talk me through what he changes and why and encourages me to do more editing. I have gotten a little better. But he does revisions on most of my stories tweeking them and making the words cuter if it is a children's story. We work well together so I like writing with him. Then I will usually go over what he wrote and tell him what i liked and didn't like and we both work on fixing it.

3 comments:

That's great that you have a husband that is an editor and will help you out. If I were a writer, I think I would want to first read it aloud and as I go, make notes or changes to what "sounds" good. Then I would go back like you are and do sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph. Then I would repeat that process until the very last time that it "sounds" good. But then again, I'm not a writer. Good luck =)

You are definitely lucky to have that kind of working relationship with your husband. My husband and I are both musicians, and work together in that capacity at times. But I admit, I don't take criticism (or direction!) all that well from him!